Saturday, December 31, 2011

Falling somewhere in the gap between Alien Sex Fiend and a slo-mo
version of The Cramps, the short-lived Anorexic Dread appeared out of DanielleDax’s hometown of Southend, Essex in 1983, lasting until just 1985. Perhaps
best described as a kind of Horror-Punk / Psychobilly outfit, other obvious
influences included The Birthday Party and Killing Joke. If they’d been
American, it’s a fair bet that Anorexic Dread almost certainly would have come
under the Deathrock tag. Frontman Phil Black was quick to belie the band’s
morbid image however, stating

“..we go onstage and
have just as much of a lunatic time leaping around. We don’t take what we do
seriously. We go onstage to enjoy ourselves and we invariably do.”

The Tracy’s Burning 12” recorded at Diploma Studios represents Anorexic Dread’s sole
contribution to vinyl. Interestingly, while discogs.com lists only one version
of the 12”, variations of the cover art appear to exist, with the band’s logo sometimes
appearing top left, and sometimes in the top right. The variant album cover can be seen on the deathrock.com link below.

Side A of the 12” begins with the epic nine minutes plus
title track “Tracy’s Burning” and its
conclusion “Epitaph” while side B
graces us with the much more Psycobillyesque “Tick Tock”. I must confess, that this didn’t do much for me on
initial hearing, but it does grow on repeated listenings, actually becoming
kind of endearing. And here for your listening pleasure:

Tracy’s
Burning / Epitaph

Tick Tock

The band played quite a few venues around Essex
including The Pink Toothbrush /Crocs (Don’t bother Googling “Crocs” – you’ll just end up with links
to a lot of sites selling some spectacularly unattractive excuses for what
passes as “shoes”). They also played The Batcave in London on at least one occasion, and managed
to wrangle a support gig with Alien Sex Fiend, a coupling I imagine would have
worked perfectly for them.

This live picture purports to have been taken at Crocs, but

the source who was nice enough to point me in its direction disputes this.

Things didn’t last too long after the 12” however, with
Anorexic Dread’s guitarist going walkabout as a roadie for The Cure. A new line-up
did record a demo “Dark Night in London”,
apparently in a more straight forward rock direction, but the band seems to
have dissolved soon after. Other songs are documented to exist including “She’s Beautiful and She’s Mine”, “Dragnet” and “Limelight”, but as far as I can tell, none were ever formally
released.

There’s a common misconception, especially amongst newer musical
collectors of subgenres that “obscurity” somehow equates with “credibility”. In
reality, some bands remained obscure because they weren’t in existence long
enough to make a real impact, some because they never got the breaks, some
because they were so left of field as to never catch on, and quite a lot who
remained obscure because they simply weren’t that good. In the case of Anorexic
Dread, I suspect that this is very much a matter of personal taste, but I do
think it worth more than just one listen before making your mind up.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Not to be confused with
the LA hardcore band of the same name, The UK version of Wasted Youth formed in
1979 at the notorious Bridge House in East London’s CanningTown, which became at
once pub, home base, gig venue and record label. Not that the lads were
complete newbies to the music scene; brothers Ken and Andy had previously
played in the Tickets, and bassist Darren was formerly in Darren’s Dead Flowers. An
unreferenced Wikipedia article also states that Ken may have also had a past in
a Black Sabbath influenced hard rock act known as Warrior, but other sources
are curiously silent on the matter. Never fear – onwards!

The first singles “Jealousy” and “I’ll Remember You” both appeared in 1980 (Bridge House Records)
before being compiled and rereleased for the French market as the cheerily
monikered My Friends Are Dead 12” ( Underdog Records, 1980), and bearing cover
art snapped at the bar of Bridge House that appears to be a homage to Hungarian
photographer Brassai’s homoerotic “Un
Costume Pour Deux” http://cs.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=76907 .

"Gott in Himmel Fraulein! Von't you get cold like zat?"

The drummer here is
curiously listed as one “Andy Doll”. Since Wikipedia states that Andy Scott was
a founding member, it’s probably not going out on a limb to presume this to be
a pseudonym, and that Andy Doll and Andy Scott are in fact one and the same. I
stand to be corrected.

Somewhere in between the
first two singles, original guitarist Mick Atkins exits stage left and is
replaced by Rocco, formerly with punk outfit Smak, and the stage is set for the
first full-length album Wild and Wandering (Bridge House Records, 1981).

The album begins
strongly with the nodding “Maybe We’ll
Die With Them”, but then moves onto shakier territory with the nowadays
politically incorrect “Housewife”,
perhaps post-punk’s answer to The Rolling Stone’s “Mother’s Little Helper” (London Records, 1966), and follows through
with the lyrically shakey ode to cougars “Games”
that in turn seems to be post punk’s answer to Simon and Garfunkle’s “Mrs Robinson” (Columbia, 1968 – or
better still, just watch the actual movie “The
Graduate”, Columbia Masterworks, 1967).

All is far from lost
however, as we move into the very Velvet Underground-esque “Pinned and Grinning”. “Wasted” follows, an intriguing song with
most of the lyrics constructed from a pastiche of titles of 60’s rock songs.
“Spot the Reference!” - it’s a fun game the whole family can play (as long as
they were born some time during the upper Jurassic) and indeed one that would
be repeated decades later by the high priests of Electro-Clash Miss Kittin and
the Hacker in “1982” (International
Deejay Gigolo Records, 2001).

Things take an exciting
new turn however with what is indisputably the album’s strongest song, the
gender-bending track “I Wish I Was A Girl”,
a strange tale of adolescent desire involving wearing your sister’s clothes.

The next track “IfTomorrow”
unfortunately does little and gets filed under filler/dirge but we have a
welcome return to form in “Survivors Pt.
1”, returning once more to the cross-dressing theme. This topic would
already seem curious in itself, but doubly so since drummer Andy Scott was also
pounding the skins for punk band Cockney Rejects, a group more commonly
associated with violent gigs and football hooliganism than anything remotely
resembling transgressing gender boundaries.

Finally, Wild and Wandering then
bows out with the very punk inspired, and again gay-friendly “Survivors Pt. 2” and leaves us on a
strong note, one that must have been quite brave for the time in which it was
recorded.

Maybe We'll Die With Them

I Wish I Was a Girl

Survivors Pt. 2

Wasted Youth leave us
with a legacy of just one more album, The Beginning of the End (Bridge House
Records, 1982), which I won’t claim to have heard, but gets a dishonourable
mention for its cover art, neatly encapsulating everything that was aesthetically
wrong with the early 80s in one single image. Things weren’t improved by the
earlier single Wildlife (Bridge House Records) in which something very bad
apparently possessed them to remake the cover art of Dynasty by Kiss
(Casablanca Records, 1979).

It wasn’t all bad though, with the single Rebecca’s
Room (Fresh/Bridge House Records, 1981) coming out with some splendid art work
that actually epitomised the emerging Goth vibe quite perfectly.

Two of these album covers are embarrassing.

We'll leave it up to you to decide which.

Just two other albums
were forthcoming, an apparent best-of ((From the) Inner Depth), Vinyl Cuts
Records, date of release unknown) and a live album (Live, label unknown, date
of release unknown) before Wasted Youth accept the wisdom of Nick Cave and “ Go shuffling out of life, just to hide in
death awhile”.

A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….

About Me

A DJ throughout the 90s at numerous Goth night clubs in Perth including The Cell, Dominion and others he was probably far too drunk to remember, largely as a result of his preference to work for bar tabs over cash. Also helped found 6RTR fm's Goth & Industrial showcase Darkwings.
More recent projects include the currently dormant Descent - a small night dedicated to playing genuinely good Goth music both old and new in preference to packing the dance floor with songs everyone had heard 20 million times before. He currently runs a monthly show on Behind the Mirror on 6RTR fm which can be heard on Wednesdays at 11pm WST.
Rumour has it he once masterminded an ill-advised Goth fanzine "Small Pleasures" that in retrospect, he remains profoundly grateful never made it off his desk.